1 Notable features of interest to consider

This is a list of features that any Haskell IDE could or should have. The IDEs listed above generally support some subset of these features. Please add more to this list if you think of anything. In future this should be expanded into separate headings with more description of how they would desirably work.

2 Software

Visual Haskell is a complete development environment for Haskell software, based on Microsoft's Microsoft Visual Studio platform. Visual Haskell integrates with the Visual Studio editor to provide interactive features to aid Haskell development, and it enables the construction of projects consisting of multiple Haskell modules, using the Cabal building/packaging infrastructure.

Eclipse is an open, extensible IDE platform for "everything and nothing in particular". It is implemented in Java and runs on several platforms. The Java IDE built on top of it has already become very popular among Java developers. The Haskell tools extend it to support editing (syntax coloring, code assist), compiling, and running Haskell programs from within the IDE. In more details, it features:

Syntax highlighting and errors/warning highlighting

A module browser showing all installed packages, their modules and the contents of the modules (functions, types, etc.)

Integration with Hoogle: select an identifier in your code, press F4 and see the results in hoogle

Code navigation: from within a Haskell source file, jump to the file where a symbol in declared, or everywhere a symbol is used (type sensitive search, not just a text search)

Outline view: quickly jump to definitions in your file

Quick fixes on common errors and import management

A cabal file editor and integration with Cabal (uses cabal configure, cabal build under the covers), and a graphical view of installed packages

Integration with GHCi: launch GHCi inside Eclipse on any module

Integration with the GHCi debugger: performs the GHCi debugging commands for you from the standard Eclipse debugging interface

Integration with HLint: gives you HLint warning on building and allows you to quick fix them

Rudimentary syntax highlighting in Eclipse can be achieved using the Colorer plugin. This is more light weight than using the EclipseFP plugin which has much functionality but can be messy to install and has sometimes been a bit shaky.

Eclipse Colorer is a plugin that enables syntax highlighting for a wide range of languages. It uses its own XML-based language for describing syntactic regions of languages. It does not include support for Haskell by default, but this can be added using the syntax description files attached below.

Download the Haskell syntax description files in Eclipse_Colorer_Haskell.tar.gz‎ and extract its contents (haskell.hrc and proto.hrc) into the following directory (overwriting proto.hrc): eclipse_installation_dir/plugins/net.sf.colorer_0.9.9/colorer/hrc

Finished. A restart of Eclipse might be required. .hs files should open with syntax highlighting.

Troubleshooting

If .hs files open with another kind of syntax highlighting check that they are associated with the Colorer Editor (Preferences -> General -> Editors -> File Associations). Or right click on them and choose Open With -> Other -> Colorer Editor.

Leksah is an IDE for Haskell written in Haskell. Leksah is intended as a practical tool to support the Haskell development process. It is an pre-release phase with bugs and open ends but actively developed and moving quickly. Hopefully, Leksah will already be interesting, useful and fun. Leksah uses GTK+ as GUI Toolkit with the gtk2hs binding. It is platform independent and should run on any platform where GTK+, gtk2hs and GHC can be installed. I have tested it on Windows and Linux. It only supports GHC.

"I found Leksah less than satisfactory on OS X Lion. I could not figure out how to reference Test.Unit in a very simple program after several hours of trying to find the right settings in Leksah, and Leksah crashes a lot. I was able to build the same program in Eclipse within a few minutes of installing Eclipse and Haskell support for Eclipse." -- Doug Ransom

Through the dark ages many a programmer has longed for the ultimate tool. In response to this most unnerving craving, of which we ourselves have had maybe more than our fair share, the dynamic trio of #Haskellaniacs (dons, dcoutts and Lemmih) hereby announce, to the relief of the community, that a fetus has been conceived: hIDE - the Haskell Integrated Development Environment. So far the unborn integrates source code recognition and a chameleon editor, resenting these in a snappy gtk2 environment. Although no seer has yet predicted the date of birth of our hIDEous creature, we hope that the mere knowledge of its existence will spread peace of mind throughout the community as oil on troubled waters. See also: HIDE/Screenshots of HIDE and HIDE

Vital is a visual programming environment. It is particularly intended for supporting the open-ended, incremental style of development often preferred by end users (engineers, scientists, analysts, etc.).

Pivotal 0.025 is an early prototype of a Vital-like environment for Haskell. Unlike Vital, however, Pivotal is implemented entirely in Haskell. The implementation is based on the use of the hs-plugins library to allow dynamic compilation and evaluation of Haskell expressions together with the gtk2hs library for implementing the GUI.

2.14 Other IDEs

The list below is incomplete. Please add to it with whatever you think of. This list should be expanded into sections, as above, with more details, with links to the actual documentation of the described features.

Vim — PROS: Free. Works on Windows. Works in terminal. Decent alignment support. Tag-based completion and jumps. Very good syntax highlighting, flymake (via Syntastic), Cabal integration, Hoogle. Documentation for symbol at point CONS: Arcane, difficult for new users. Some complain of bad indentation support.

Emacs— PROS: Free. Works on Windows. Works in terminal. Decent alignment, indentation, syntax highlighting. Limited type information (type and info of name at point). Cabal/GHC/GHCi awareness and Haskell-aware REPL. Completion and jump-to-definition (via ETAGS). Documentation of symbol at point. Hoogle. Documentation for symbol at point. Flymake (error checking on the fly). CONS: Arcane, difficult for new users.

Sublime — PROS: Works on Windows. CONS: Poor alignment support (though there are packages to do indentation a little better). Proprietary.

Yi — PROS: Written in Haskell. Works in terminal. CONS: Very immature, lacking features. Problems building generally, especially on Windows.

Leksah — PROS: Syntax highlighting. Understands Cabal, Module browser, dependency knowledge, documentation display inside the IDE, jump-to-definition, flymake (error checking on the fly), limited evaluation of snippets, scratch buffer. Autocompletion. Not an arcane interface a la Emacs/Vim. CONS: Doesn't have a decent REPL. Are there any other cons? — This should be moved to the section above.